Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education Advance Access originally published online on September 28, 2005
The Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 2006 11(1):56-75; doi:10.1093/deafed/enj002
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Empirical Articles |
Syntactic Movement in Orally Trained Children With Hearing Impairment
Tel Aviv University
This study explored the comprehension and production of sentences derived by syntactic movement, in orally trained school-age Hebrew-speaking children with moderate to profound hearing impairment, aged 7;8–9;9 years. Experiments 1 and 2 tested the comprehension of relative clauses and topicalization sentences (with word orders of OVS [object, verb, subject] and OSV [object, subject, verb]) using a sentence–picture matching task. Experiments 3 and 4 tested the production of relative clauses using two elicitation tasks. Experiment 5 tested the comprehension of relative clauses with and without resumptive pronouns. As a group, the children with hearing loss failed to understand object relatives and OVS topicalization sentences. In the production tasks they either avoided producing a sentence with syntactic movement, by using a relative clauses with a resumptive pronoun instead of a gap or by producing a sentence without a relative clause, or produced ungrammatical sentences. They understood correctly object relatives with resumptive pronouns, which are not derived by movement. Both comprehension and production of the hearing-impaired group was significantly different from that of the hearing control group. Individual performance was strongly correlated with the age of intervention: only children who received hearing aids before the age of 8 months performed well in the comprehension tasks. Type of hearing aid, duration of use of a cochlear implant, and degree of hearing loss did not correlate with syntactic comprehension.
1 Under some syntactic analyses, the detailed mechanism that derives object relatives is the following: the object NP within the embedded clause is a relative operator, and it undergoes Wh movement to the specifier position of CP, where it is coindexed with the head of the relative clause. So the more elaborate structure of (4) is: This is the grandmother1 [CP Op1 that the girl kissed t1]. Because syntactic movement is involved in both cases, we will abstract away from this difference. Correspondence should be sent to Naama Friedmann, School of Education, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel (e-mail: naamafr{at}post.tau.ac.il).
Received April 5, 2005; revised June 15, 2005; accepted June 21, 2005
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